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A suspected Boko Haram kingpin and his brother were killed in a gun dwell on Sunday in Kaduna.Residents of the area said soldiers from Kano traced the house around 12:30 a.m. on Sunday in Kinkinau GRA, Ungwan Muazu. They called on the suspect, Usman, to come out, and then a gun fight ensued.
“The soldiers kept shouting his name to come out of his house. He resisted arrest and started shooting from the ceiling where he was hiding,” a neighbour of the suspect said.
“The soldiers broke through the wall to gain entrance into the house and finally got the family of the culprits out of the house and engaged him into a gun battle that lasted for about three hours, before he was finally gunned down with his brother, whose name is yet to be ascertained.
“We are still in a state of surprise and deep shock after what we witnessed,” another neighbour said.
The District Head of Ungwan Muazu and Cikasauron Zazzau, Ahmed Idris, confirmed the incident. He called on residents and landlords to be security conscious and verify the identity of tenants in their houses.
The owner of the house said the suspect had been occupying the house since two months ago.
There were blood stains, bullet holes on ceilings and walls when PREMIUM TIMES visited the suspect’s house. The ceiling had also been pulled out
A bunch of broken GSM Sim cards, empty cylinders, and many school certificates suspected to have been retrieved from new recruits by the kingpin were said to have been recovered by the police.
Sources said the landlord and caretaker of the house were also invited for questioning by the Police.
It is not clear what happened to the suspect’s family, consisting of two wives and three children. Some neighbours said they came back the next morning, picked some personal belongings and disappeared. Other neighbours said the soldiers who came for the operation took them away.
A security source said the soldiers earlier arrested one Boko Haram suspect in Rigasa, a suburb in Kaduna and took him into custody at the 1 Mechanized Division, Nigerian Army Head Quarters, Kaduna.
The arrest, the source said, led to the arrest of another member of the group in Kano. The latter was brought in from Kano and his phone used to communicate with the unsuspecting Kingpin, Usman.
The spokesperson of the army in Kaduna, Usman Abdullahi, when contacted, said he would get back to our reporter as soon as he gets details of the incident.
But after a whole day, subsequent calls and text messages, no response was gotten from Mr. Abdullahi.
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